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Looking For Linux Hardware In A Easy Shopping List

03-05-2011, 04:20 PM

Phoronix: Looking For Linux Hardware In A Easy Shopping List

After talking about the first week of OpenBenchmarking.org, which was a great success, news of this open and collaborative testing platform made its way to the front page of Slashdot. This resulted in a huge increase in benchmarks pouring in over last night and they keep coming in today. Thanks to this greater data set, here's a new feature that will interest many of you: the ability to easily find compatible GPUs / motherboards / CPUs / disks that are ranked upon how they perform with a given driver and operating system...

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Radeon X1800 and X1950 are considered high end graphics processors? Really?

Compared to newer GPUs on open-source drivers, yes. Look at some of the recent Phoronix results indicating the Gallium3D performance relative to Catalyst, etc, and other R300g tests with it being more mature.

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TSo any specific items for improvement are much appreciated. It's easy to change the UI when I know what to change.

The UI really needs a lot of work. I can see the site has lots of really usefull functions for joining data and comparing but it's really hard to use. Imagine I want to compare the performance of an Athlon II X4 to that of a Core2Quad. The only way to do that (that I can see) is to come up with a magical search string that will return results for both of them. That's impossible right now.
Also, there should be some kind of normalization on the test names that appear when doing a search, because using the name that the user wrote isn't very helpful. If I'm looking for results about a CPU, the CPU names should be the name of the tests, that is the first thing in the test boxes in bold, and not something like "disk-test-number34". You also need a lot of work in the algorythm for coming up with the prices:

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I'm not sure about you, but i wouldn't classify the macbook air as a "motherboard", also where can i get one for the $20 it shows as the price....

I agree about the interface. I can't find a link to the indexes, so i resorted to URL hacking...

Also as this is just performance there is no way to know that "wireless card A" gets 20kbps more bandwidth than "wireless card B" but sometimes crashes causing a kernel panic or that the onboard USB on motherboard Y sometimes just quits working requiring a reboot.

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Yeah, UI design is the part I hate the most and am the worst at... So any specific items for improvement are much appreciated. It's easy to change the UI when I know what to change.

I have a feeling most people are going to come to the site to see if "XYZ" works, or to compare some things, like "q6600 C2D vs. X4 955" or "6750, 5770 Vs GTS450, GTX470, GTX580 while using fglrx and nvidia drivers"

A search I would like to do is "all cpus under 95W TDP, that fit in sockets 1156, 1155, AM3, sorted by test result X when the test systems have 8GB of ram" Now this gets tricky as there is a 95W variant of the the 1055T X6, and a 125W version as well.

Right now there seems to be no way to get useful comparisons out of your database with confidence numbers. Most of the CPU tests will need to be nominalized for amount of RAM and maybe even disk speed. Unless all of the CPU tests are small enough to fit in the cache of the CPU and do not require much in the way of disk access.